s full of tantalizing glimpses of the
charming spots I have passed on the road and could never stop to
explore. This time we really did it. We left the little railway station,
sitting plain and useful beside the track, went up the road past a few
farmhouses, over a fence and across a soft ploughed field, and down to
the little river, willow-bordered, shallow, golden-brown, with here and
there a deep pool under an overhanging hemlock or a shelving, fretted,
bush-tangled bank.

We sat down in the sun on a willow log and put our rods together. Does
anything sound prettier than the whir and click of the reel as one pulls
out the line for the first time on an April day? We sat and looked at
the world for a little, and let the wind, with just the faint chill of
the vanishing snows still in it, blow over us, and the sun, that was
making anemones and arbutus every minute, warm us through. It was almost
too good to begin, this day that we had stolen. I felt like a child with
a toothsome cake-- "I'll put it away for a while and have it later."

But, after all, it was already begun. We had not stolen it, it had
stolen us, and it held us in its power. Soon we wandered on, at first
hastening for the mere joy of motion and the freshness of things; then,
as the wind lessened and the sun shone hot in the hollows, loitering
more and more, dropping a line here and there where a deep pool looked
suggestive. Trout? Yes, we caught some. Jonathan pulled in a good many;
I got enough to seem industrious. I seldom catch as many as Jonathan,
though he tries to give me all the best holes; because really there are
so many other things to attend to. Men seem to go fishing chiefly to
catch fish. Jonathan spends half an hour working his rod and line
through a network of bushes, briers, and vines, to drop it in a chosen
spot in a pool. He swears gently as he works, but he works on, and
usually gets his fish. I don't swear, so I know I could never carry
through such an undertaking, and I don't try.

I did try once, when I was young and reckless. I headed the tip of my
rod, like a lance in rest, for the most open spot I could see. For the
fisherman's rule in the woods is not "Follow the flag," but "Follow your
tip," and I tried to follow mine. This necessitated reducing myself
occasionally to the dimensions of a filament, but I was elastic, and I
persisted. The brambles neatly extracted my hat-pins and dropped them in
the tangle about my feet; they pu